The drive was uneventful. We three talked. It has always astonished me how women talk. Men talk, but women talk as if engaged in research, talk in no direction, pondering, investigating, acting out scenes, asking open-ended questions, spinning a life like a spiderweb and dancing upon that woven life.
I’d had no friends for many years. There was Leo, then the wild, undifferentiated world. It took me time to speak. But a thick rain began after Redding, and we were snug in the car, my same safe car from times before. They told me about their week with Holly. They talked about the men and boys they’d lost. They talked about grief, and how losing their mom to a heart attack was like this but different. They said maybe God did this to teach us, and maybe it wasn’t right or wrong but a thing like an earthquake, a thing God saw very differently in His front-row seat in eternity. They talked about recovery from loss, how Maya was good at it, but Micah wasn’t.
Here I opened up and talked about an old Chinese novel I’d once read, in which the daughter of a family becomes a concubine of the Chinese emperor. For years, her family is no longer allowed to see her because her status is too exalted, but at last the emperor graciously allows his concubines to go home for a family visit, but only if the family builds a suitable palace. So the girl’s family builds a palace with courtyard gardens and grand pavilions, and composes couplets to engrave on the doors, and imports a troupe of actresses to perform in the theater of the palace, and builds a monastery, which they fill with twenty Buddhist nuns and twenty Taoist nuns. At last, all is ready, and the daughter arrives with countless imperial eunuchs preceding her in formation to carry her court costumes, and the concubine herself is borne by eunuchs on a silk-upholstered sedan chair. She climbs out in the palace’s central courtyard and bursts into tears and says, “We must be happy now. Who knows when I will be allowed to see you again?” And I said I wished I could build a palace for every person I’d lost—for every person Maya and Micah had lost—even if they could only weep with us for an hour because we might never meet again.
Saying this, I was building a palace of a kind, or making a palace of the rain-bound car to weep in with Micah and Maya. And they cried with me as we imagined all the palaces women would build on this orphaned world. Meanwhile, the sun set. The land dimmed, became secretive. The mountains had given way to a dark, vast plain, a quietness in which our voices lived. Sometimes headlights or taillights swam past in the rain, very few and dazzling, like tropical fish. They trailed reflections as our voices boomed, became music, were a color in the dark.
I didn’t tell them my story, the story of Alain. Still I’ll put it here, since it felt so present to me in that raining night. It’s the story I might have told if I were innocent, if I hadn’t told them my name was Natalie, if I hadn’t spent my whole life lying and avoiding the consequences of my crimes.
The story begins very tragically, with my mother’s death from cancer, a terrible death where she was angry all the time from the pain and fear, from being surgically mutilated, trapped in a hospital, facing her own extinction, and she took it out on me and my father. If we told her we loved her, she said, “And what good does that do me?” If we brought food, she said we should have known she was always nauseous. If we asked if she wanted anything else, she said, “Yes. Not to die.” If we talked about our lives, she cried and called us selfish, because all that was lost to her. She also bitterly complained that we never said we loved her, never brought her anything or asked what she wanted, never told her about our lives. The cancer had metastasized to her brain, so there was no one to blame. I was a kid, and it was maybe reprehensible that my father took me to see her at all. But it was that or I didn’t see my dying mother.
When she first got sick, I was eleven and had just gotten serious about ballet. When she was dying, I was often absent, at classes or rehearsals or performances. My father wanted us to cope by going to church, where I offended him by surreptitiously watching ballet on my phone. Once my mother died, I almost never went home. That’s where Alain begins.
As everyone knew at one time, but has now mercifully forgotten, Alain Cornyn was the founder and director of the Baltimore Youth Ballet. BYB was created to allow young dancers, ages fourteen to eighteen, to dance professionally and get exposure, experience, and a paycheck early in their careers. All the principal roles were danced by teens. There were tutors for all school subjects, and I know there must have been classes sometimes, but I have no conscious memory of them. Alain was from a very rich family, and the company was funded by their wealthy friends. It was prehistoric white Baltimore money, some of which derived from the transatlantic slave trade. Alain liked to confess this, making much of the Arab side of his heritage and talking about black sheep. BYB championed diversity, of course, and had a program that recruited disadvantaged kids from countries like Brazil and Kenya. Many people in the dance world hated Alain, but at the time, he was untouchable: a hero of the arts.
When I joined, BYB still had a full-time manager, Cleopatra Daniels, a voluptuous Greek American woman who was clearly sexually involved with Alain and bullied him in front of everyone, often berating him in her Mini Cooper in the parking lot where anyone could hear her bellicose voice, insistently sexy and throaty from cigarettes, the roar of the sexual lioness. Then the doors would open, and they both would come silently out. They had an open relationship. So said gossip. She’d once been a principal dancer but had had a spinal injury and now walked with a cane.
While Cleopatra was there, Alain was always tête-à-tête with her. On his few forays among us, he would announce that he’d escaped her clutches. He wouldn’t stay long and would receive a continuous stream of texts from her, texts that made him look flustered and exposed. Then one day Cleopatra was gone. That barrier was lifted, and everything changed.
Before I go on, I want to remind you this is a ballet story; it lives in the flight and the adrenaline, that cross between a Disneyland ride and a superpower, all wrapped up in a princess fantasy: a very young girl’s idea of sex. It’s also a lot of sweat, pain, boredom, and long bus trips to cheap hotels—but the soaring was always about to happen. We were the children of the air. There was no one like Alain for evoking that fairyland, for weaving its highs into everyday life, so our gossip felt like court intrigue, and a drive to the hardware store at night was black tulle on an enchanted lake. He was also that thrilling adult who invited teenagers back to his house, a house that had real art, real antique rugs, a real library with leather-bound books; who let us have one champagne cocktail and drove us home at two A.M. Who made that feel like love. When any of us had an injury, Alain dispensed painkillers from his stash, while telling cautionary tales about ODs, and how once in Thailand he and Cleopatra got addicted to a certain white pill they bought from a dealer who went by “Mickey Mouse,” who spoke no English but “Hey” and “Mickey Mouse,” and they never did find out what the pill was.
Alain was handsome but a little peculiar-looking. His heritage, he said, was “Mayflower-Algerian”: sharp Scottish features and green eyes with olive skin and black hair. He’d once been cast in a movie as an elf, but was fired by the director because he made the other elves look too human. Or that’s the story he told; that might be one of the ones that wasn’t true. He was small. At six feet, I was much taller than he was, and almost all the boys were too. He liked to call himself “the detestable little monkey,” a thing he was called once in a review. In his youth, he’d “whored around,” he said, with both men and women, had been the toy of a count and a celebrity chef and a South American dictator’s daughter. These friends had given him a Patek Philippe wristwatch and a motorbike and various items of emerald jewelry to match his grass-green eyes. These tokens he called “hunting trophies.” The jewelry was now in a safe-deposit box because he didn’t want to pay to have it insured. Naturally intimate with everyone, on tour he was in and out of hotel rooms, barefoot in the corridors, eating french fries off our room-service trays, bearing tales, playing favorites. He’d briefly been a dancer himself and was dexterous, graceful, and surprisingly strong. He could do any physical thing, like a musician who can pick up any instrument and play. He was also highly cultured in the casual way of the rich. He was always making us watch Russian films, explaining the symbolism of cathedrals, expressing his contempt for some overrated artist none of us had heard of. Once he gave Beckett’s The Unnamable to a sixteen-year-old dance jock, and the poor kid read it from cover to cover, comprehending nothing, for love of Alain. Everyone was in love with Alain. Alain didn’t like to work with dancers who didn’t seem infatuated at the first interview. He said art was a child of love. He himself was asexual, he liked to say, with one hand on a fourteen-year-old’s nape, the fourteen-year-old lit up like a jack-o’-lantern, ready and not ready. We all dreamed of seducing him. One night, a group of us discussed what we’d be willing to do if Alain would be our boyfriend, vying to best each other with the sacrifices we were willing to make: Would you give up dancing? Would you be in a wheelchair? What if he never even fucked you? What if he fucked you, but then you had to die in ten years? Five years?
He would say, “If God had wanted us to be good, He wouldn’t have made us beautiful.” He would say, “If I’m a monster or a genius, if I’m anything, it’s because I’m lonely.” When someone asked what he did in the company, he said, “I am the atmosphere. I am the air.”
Once Cleopatra Daniels was gone, he singled me out very quickly. One of the first things he told me was that Cleopatra wasn’t her real name. It was the name of Alain’s very first assistant, from twelve years before, but he could never be reconciled to any assistant who did not have that lovely name. An assistant was a boring pest; a Cleopatra was an intoxicant, a helpmeet, a captive child of faerie. The name transcended personality. An assistant inhabited the name, just as a dancer danced Giselle.
I said, “Could I be a Cleopatra?”
At that time, Cleopatra Daniels was twenty-one years old. I was fifteen.
It was Nutcracker season, just before Christmas. We’d chartered a bus for a tour of four cities in the Northwest, and we were scheduled to perform in Bozeman, Montana, on my sixteenth birthday. I was already booking our travel then, and Alain told me to book myself a separate room as a birthday present. My family was careful with money, especially since my mother’s illness, and the prices of hotels frightened me, so I chose the cheapest place I could find, a dive called the Jokers Wild Hotel and Casino. The casino part consisted of a basement room filled with broken slot machines. The floors were concrete, and a deadly chill penetrated the thin brown carpet. There was truck parking out back, and eighteen-wheelers pulled in and out all night, groaning deafeningly, shaking the walls. This time, unlike any subsequent time, Alain laughed indulgently about my mistake.
I don’t remember that night’s performance, but I remember how it always was: the dusty vastness of small-town auditoriums; the outer-space feeling of winter parking lots whose silence is broken by a slamming car door; us play-fighting as we walked to the bus, a girl happily trapped across a boy’s shoulders, shrieking as he lazily spun around. We were too young to do much in those towns. We would walk to a supermarket and spend an hour there wandering as if it were a mall. Sometimes we went to a restaurant and only ordered dessert. There were occasional drunken escapades when someone had a fake ID, which typically ended with clandestine puking and whispered terrors of being fired from the company. And of course there were the red-hot crushes and spats, the incestuous tribal emotional life, all magnified by an athlete’s body chemistry, so it felt hypersignificant, sublime, immense, like the final events in the world. We were all so beautiful in those towns. We were the flowers of the dumb gray world.
Dancers, like waiters, keep late hours. We got back from the theater after eleven, and then the night began. That night of my sixteenth birthday, everybody came back to my private room, all the dancers and some locals, including a local boy Alain had met at intermission. We had a supermarket cake with candles I blew out, but the party never gelled. The bathroom door in my room wouldn’t close all the way, so people had to pee with the door a little open, the urine stream audible. If someone farted, the conversation in the other room paused. We laughed about this, but it made the atmosphere stiff. The company dwindled rapidly, until there was only Alain, the local boy, and me.
Now Alain brought out wine, two bottles. We drank from the bottle, the boy and I laughing, young enough to be conscious of what our parents would say if they knew. They didn’t know, and that felt like nothing else. Alain had brought a portable speaker and was playing raga music and telling stories about his time in Mumbai while we drank the second bottle. The boy fell silent, staring at my breasts. I kept thinking Alain might kiss me if we could just get rid of the boy, a thing I’d been fantasizing about since he first called me Cleopatra. Then Alain told me I needed a shower. He used the word “stinking”—not as harsh as it sounds; all dancers sweat buckets every day and it stinks. For me, there was a flattering intimacy in the word. It was the boy who blushed.
Showering, I was aware of the translucent shower curtain and the unclosing door, of what someone would see if they came in. I knew they wouldn’t come in. I was aroused nonetheless. The music came to an end and wasn’t replaced. The silence in the other room grew. I came out at last in a bathrobe to find Alain and the boy playing cards on the floor and smoking weed. They’d both taken off their shirts. It wasn’t that, but the silence.
They looked up. Alain said, “Sean has something he wants to ask you.”
The boy was like the later boys: smooth-faced, with the clean, natural muscles of youth, very beautiful and very heterosexual. For him, I was an unexpected way to get laid, and at that age I was attractive in an obvious way: blond, with long, smooth legs; breasts large for a dancer; all brand new. Alain behaved, winkingly, as if the boy were a last-minute birthday present and I part of his louche world of emeralds and dictators’ daughters, where a casual fuck was nothing, a penny. I did want sex. I thought about it all the time. There was no clear decision and I’d said yes. I was mainly afraid they would see how inexperienced I was, that I’d never done more than kissing. Once it began, the feelings were too big to identify. We grappled clumsily and our teeth kept knocking together, but when the boy touched my nipple, it dizzied me. The bottom fell out of the night; I was kissing the boy and self-consciously moaning, worried this wasn’t how adults moaned. I felt the boy’s erection against me, and it was amazing proof such things did exist; they weren’t just a dirty kind of science fiction. I let him pull off my bathrobe and was proud that it was easy for me, that I wasn’t ashamed of my strong body. Still, when he parted my legs, I instinctively resisted. Then, when I gave way, I felt my cunt as a blazing light. He angled his cock against me clumsily, and at first there didn’t seem to be an opening. I was a freak, my hole too small. Then he’d found it and forced his way inside, and the pain was too much. I was going to die. Scattered all around us on the bed were red paper plates with chocolate crumbs and smears of pale blue frosting, pastel candles piled dirtily on one plate. The plates all trembled with the motion. This was the last place I would ever see.
Almost instantly, the boy stiffened and shuddered. He pulled out, and I was left disgustingly wet, ashamed, my body full of strange lights and grief. I hadn’t died, and when I put my hand to my crotch, there was only a slight trace of blood among the semen. I could do it. I could make a man come. I was safe now. Still, a terrible fear was loose in me. More than anything, I needed the boy to leave.
Alain smoked a cigarette. He watched us frankly. I was only aware much later that he’d planned it for the night I was first legal.
Alain was a voyeur. He didn’t like being touched. Despite all that’s been said, I never saw him do anything sexual to a boy. None of the boys ever saw him naked. The fucking was all me, a fact that would later make him difficult to prosecute.
He also prompted me to find the boys. Sometimes he made an introduction, but sometimes he just talked insinuatingly about being bored and said, “But I know I can count on you.” After a while, I became a professional. I giggled and flattered and touched boys’ chests; it was easy when it wasn’t my idea. Once a boy was alone with us, however, I fell into a wordless state where I couldn’t do anything without direction. The boys too were crippled with embarrassment, and it’s still remarkable to me how subtly Alain could manage us. A hint dropped here, an assumption made there, almost always achieved his desired result.
He made me part of his game of “corrupting youth” and openly talked about preferring young boys. I played along; I would huddle with him in corridors and laugh about our “Ganymedes.” He led me to agree there was just no challenge in fucking an eighteen-year-old “man” and taught me to see sex with a fourteen-year-old as a hilarious gotcha to the uptight world. He talked about “raiding the international program,” saying American dancers all lived in the pockets of “Mommy and Daddy,” while the age of consent in most countries was fourteen and no one batted an eyelid. Still, I noticed that, after I’d fucked an international boy, Alain always found some reason to fire him and send him back to his home country.
If I failed to attract a boy Alain wanted, he was furious and wouldn’t speak to me for days. I cried and believed he didn’t love me anymore. I believed no one would ever love me and thought about jumping under a train. Then the change would come: Alain’s conspiratorial smile across the studio, him calling me to sit beside him in a café, his eloquent touch on my shoulder in passing. I would light up to my fingertips, restored from death to life.
Although he didn’t have sex with other people, Alain was not asexual. After each boy left, he liked me to stay in the room while he masturbated. He didn’t mind if I looked at a magazine, but if I tried to leave, he became enraged. One time he told me not to “fuck him around.” To me, those masturbation scenes more than anything had the power of nightmare. I remember them as if I were screaming and trying to escape. Nonetheless I used to fantasize about them when I masturbated myself. I also used to fantasize about two teens performing sexually for an older man. Once, just once, Alain stroked my vulva, encouraging a shy boy to follow suit, and I was disgusted, prudishly shocked, and hated myself for having a cunt, this gross thing that made gross things happen—but I also came. It’s possible this has no meaning. It may just be a twitching of nerves and firing of synapses in response to stimuli. But it’s one of the reasons I will never be whole, I can never feel good. It’s why I need sex too much, though it can make me feel terrified, ashamed, disembodied, so it’s like being beaten even as I come. I will never know what sex is like for other people.
At the same time, there’s so much I can’t remember that I don’t really know what it was like. I remember one boy’s strange name, Sylvanus, but I can’t remember which one he was. There was a boy who cried afterwards; the reasons are gone. I remember the Brazilian international student very well and how, when we danced together, he hummed the music to himself with a dopey, faraway expression. I remember he was the youngest boy I fucked, thirteen and eleven months, and Alain congratulated me for breaking the “fourteen barrier,” and I remember bruising my knuckles by punching a door when he was sent home. I don’t remember fucking him. I remember flashes of obscenity accompanied by emotions I had much later, like narration dubbed in. I remember all the boys’ faces. Of course, when I fucked them, we were about the same age. Now they all look like children.
I was never entirely docile, and Alain and I had ugly fights. Once I refused to fuck a boy, and when Alain pressed the issue, I called him a pimp and he slapped my face and I slapped him back. When I found out Alain had fired the Brazilian boy, we had a fight that stretched over three days. I shrieked in rage and didn’t care who heard. I berated him in his BMW in the parking lot where anyone could hear my hysterical voice, made hoarse from too much screaming. I found out one day he’d told the new kids I was twenty-five, and they thought it was “weird and unfair” that I was still getting cast when it was meant to be a youth company. That was another three-day fight. Once I called him a child molester, needing him to deny it, but he saw through this and taunted me by saying he’d always been a pedophile, the younger the better. I jumped out of his car at a red light and pounded on the hood, screaming the word, until he drove away.
I still don’t know what people knew. I do know the dance mistress hated me and warned the younger children to avoid me, which made me cool and forbidden and probably made recruiting boys easier. Dancing with them not so much. I did always have friends among the dancers, though I couldn’t tell them anything important. At the end of the day, the only person I could talk to was Alain. Alain and I had habits together, inside jokes, favorite songs we sang in the car. We talked for hours every day, and we did discuss very seriously whether we were harming people. We argued about it, and he listened to me, although I couldn’t change his mind. I dictated rules to him, which he then broke, and we discussed what made him do that. There was also a night I realized I’d never be a real professional dancer, with the undeniable truth of intuition, and Alain spent hours calming me down. He stroked my head while I wept. He said being too tall wasn’t such a blight and people could choreograph around it. He said the technique would come. He said that, even if I was right, he’d gone through the same, and look at him now. When I sobbed, “Then I should kill myself,” he graciously laughed and said, “Oh, you’d never really be like me.” So I want you to know I loved this person. Looking back, no part of it feels right, but at the time I was inside of it and it was my life.
And I was still a part of the company, the spats and crushes, the tribal life. Alain could still come among us and be a beloved pied piper figure, and in that role, he was innocent and loved us; we were all one flesh. Even now I can conjure a night in Vermont, where it was lightly snowing, and we all walked from our hotel across an empty highway to a supermarket lit up like Christmas. Ours were the only footprints in the frail tissue of snow on the road, and Araceli and Justin walked in my footprints to “throw off the cops” about how many we were; we played make-believe about the crime we’d gotten away with, the murder of a local girl who’d come up after our performance to say, “I didn’t know anyone still did ballet.” We all shouted, “Dancers will kick your ass!” running and skidding on the icy road. In the supermarket, I bought beef jerky and a paperback mystery to read in the hotel, and on the way back, Alain was walking ahead, on his phone, berating the local contact person, one hand gesticulating all around him, and we started imitating him behind his back. When he wheeled around, suspicious, we all stopped at once, then burst out laughing. Alain made a finger gun and shot at one girl, who pretended to die in the street, falling prettily into the frail snow. It was in some ways the happiest time of my life, when I didn’t know right from wrong. Although I did know right from wrong.
And maybe they all knew what was going on, at least knew something. Once Alain took some of us along to his mother’s house, and while she was in the bathroom, he told us his Algerian grandfather had been a storyteller in the souk. Just then his mother came back and said, laughing too nervously, “Don’t be silly, Alain, he was a judge.” Alain said airily, “A man can wear two hats.” After that, whenever we suspected him of lying, we kids would say, “Two hats,” and he would say, “Oh, babies, you know me too well,” and we laughed daringly, adoringly, knowingly. That was the complicity he wove all around him, the way we enjoyed being in on his lies, how his loving mother was jittery and knew it was wrong—but said nothing. Did nothing. And I did nothing. And a year of those boys did nothing. And the boys of all the other Cleopatras did nothing. Some adults spoke to Alain with a visible reserve and sneaked glances at me as if I were a taboo object, a vibrator left on a dinner table. They smiled the whole time Alain was talking, a prurient smile of discomfiture, but said nothing, did nothing. And even when someone did something, it was nothing. One boy asked Alain, “But she agrees? This isn’t something you make her do?” and Alain laughed at the idea, but you could tell the boy did not believe, and then it felt very different fucking him. An ethical drama was unfolding in the boy because he thought he was using Alain’s slave. He couldn’t come and at last announced he needed a Coke from the vending machine. I went with him to show him where it was, and we stopped in the hotel corridor by the glassed-in swimming pool, where a family with young children were splashing and laughing. The colors in the pool behind the glass were very bright—the red and yellow of the little kids’ swimsuits and the turquoise water—while the hall where the boy and I stood was a colorless place like a bleached coral reef. The boy said, “You don’t have to stay with that man. You’re a ballerina. You’re really talented. You could do anything with your life.” He said I could stay with him and his mom if I didn’t have anywhere to go. “Doing that stuff is different for a guy.” I started crying and stood there with tears running down my face, hating him. Then we went back and he fucked me until he finished. That was how things worked in that time.
That year was so long, it was a life within a life. It had a death.
We were back in Baltimore for July and August. My father had flown in to see me dance in a recital for parents and donors. I’d had to walk to his hotel in ninety-degree weather, and when he hugged me hello, the stickiness of my skin and the pressure of my sweaty breasts on his chest felt sexual. I was repelled and frightened. I excused myself and went to the ladies’ room to cry. When I came out, I saw him standing with his back to me, a dejected and ordinary figure, but his heavy male body looked obscene. I began to shiver in the air-conditioning. I slipped past him and went outside, where I hid out of sight of the windows and lit a cigarette. People passed; when they came near, I started shivering again and was filled with hatred for those people. By the time I got back to my father, he’d been waiting ten minutes and was suspicious and hostile. Then, at lunch, he said he’d been lonely at home, and for a moment I heard it as a sexual reproach and thought he was suggesting I fuck him.
Before the performance, I told Alain about these feelings. He reacted as if I’d brought him a gift and said, “I felt that from him too.” I performed with that in my head and fell onstage. I felt my father see it.
A board member brought her nine-year-old son to this performance, and after the show, they both came backstage. The child still had that platinum baby hair, and he’d spent the whole summer swimming in a pool, so the chemicals had tinted his hair pale green. Alain was in raptures over this child, announcing repeatedly that he was hilarious. He kept addressing everything he said to the boy, who chattered importantly and glowed when Alain laughed uproariously at his jokes. At last Alain said he wanted a photograph and got the boy to sit in my lap. He directed us, getting me to put my hand on the boy in various places. All around us were parents and donors drinking wine from plastic cups and laughing. My father was trying to get my attention to leave. At last, the boy detached himself and ran away with the abruptness of a much younger child. Then his mother apologized to Alain, looking flushed and somehow dishonest. In the taxi back to my dorm, this scene kept repeating in my head: the child resisting and detaching himself; my father impatient in my peripheral vision; the mother apologizing with her false smile.
I woke the next morning and still knew nothing. I shared a dorm room then with a girl named Meghan. Our joke was that we always made each other late, and that day too we came to class late. Instead of finding the other kids warming up at the barre, we found them sitting on the studio floor with an unknown white woman talking to them. I remember the shock of the unfamiliar tableau and how the kids swiveled their heads to watch me come in. I stopped in my tracks while Meghan moved on hurriedly, going to sit with the others. Alain wasn’t there, and I gradually realized the woman was telling us why he would not be coming back. She used the phrase “misconduct with students.” I don’t know how long I stood and listened. I remember the woman was wearing pink espadrilles and a chic dress with cheerful red zigzags, and that it seemed undignified in that context. I remember her naming Alyssa Daniels as the person who first alerted the board and how I realized this was the previous Cleopatra. By the time I left I was breathing strangely, trying to expel all the air from my lungs, as would become my lifelong habit when I was very upset.
In the parking lot a man and woman in business suits were waiting for me. They’d either just arrived, or Meghan and I hadn’t noticed them on our way in. The woman threw down her cigarette and they both walked to meet me. I was slightly taller than them both and still young enough that that made me anxious. I kept trying to stoop. My first guess was that they were child psychiatrists; I’d had some experience with child psychiatrists after my mother’s death. Only when I heard the word “police” did I realize what I’d done, that I was no longer a child who would be helped.
There in the parking lot, they explained Romeo and Juliet laws to me—those laws that mean sex with a minor isn’t a crime if there’s only a few years’ difference in age. Then they named three states that didn’t have such laws for victims under fifteen, three states where I’d committed felony rape, including Maryland. Then they read me my rights.
I sobbed wildly as I was being cuffed. In the midst of this, the other dancers came out and, as they passed by us, fell silent. No one met my eye or looked concerned. For me, having friends was over. Some laughed, and I remember it as gloating and malicious, but probably they were just afraid—just children.
The two cops put me in a car and drove me to the station. Only there, in an interview room, did they inform me I might avoid prison time if I helped them convict Alain.
Maya and Micah and I took turns driving all night. It was one of the purest nights of my life, when I talked and listened and nothing happened. I didn’t mention Alain. I was Natalie. I talked about my husband and son and wept. Micah talked about her sons. Maya talked about her husband. Dawn came and there were hours when the sun was rising in the middle of nowhere, green exit signs silhouetted against its glare: UKIAH, SANTA ROSA, SACRAMENTO. Everywhere a taste of dust, a brown and indistinct air that came from farms drying up and blowing away, their irrigation systems stilled by power cuts.
Shortly after dawn, we arrived in San Francisco. I told Micah and Maya to go on to San Jose. I gave them my address and said to get the car back to me whenever. It wouldn’t be very much use without gas. I’d initially thought of bringing them with me into the ComPA office, thinking their presence might speak for me; they were a good deed I’d just done. But for my plan to work, I had to announce who I was, and I didn’t want to see the twins’ reaction when they heard the name Jane Pearson. So they got into my car and drove away, waving. I never saw them or the car again.
The ComPA offices were in a mixed-use building. The electricity seemed to be out, and the sliding doors were lodged in the open position. Passing through the empty space, I remembered walking through the broken glass door of the Albertsons supermarket and again felt as if I were stepping through a mirror. I paused there to find my wallet and take out my old ComPA card. The clothes in my backpack stank of old sweat, but I knew these details made no difference. I might be accepted or rejected, but it wouldn’t depend on how I smelled. Some parts of the directory in the foyer were already taped over with new names: HOUSING COMMITTEE. PLANNING COMMITTEE. EDUCATION GROUP. At the doorman’s desk were two women in red shirts embroidered with black Commensalist Party of America symbols. The red shirts were new, but I knew the symbols—the open hand that meant security committee, the fork and knife that meant officer grade. The ComPAs had devised these symbols out of concern that some members might be illiterate, although in my time we were all college students.
I also recognized the woman with the knife-and-fork insignia, a Chinese woman with alopecia. Her scalp showed through in streaks that made her hair look crudely sketched in. I’d met her years ago at a new members picnic where she was the only new member. She had the beautiful name Luli. At the time Luli had just gotten a tattoo on her calf of a naked woman riding a broomstick, which had sparked a long discussion of why the tattoo was empowering, not problematic. I’d then excited universal hostility by asking how much the tattoo cost. I’d intended to be class-conscious; instead I was a white girl insinuating there was something fishy about a woman of color being able to afford a tattoo. She was also going bald while I had thick blond hair, so the optics could not have been worse. On the other hand, she turned out to be an electronics heiress, so I wasn’t all wrong.
The next time I saw Luli, at an anti-eviction rally, she didn’t appear to remember me. Evangelyne wanted to introduce us—she was grooming Luli as a donor—but I claimed to be having a PTSD day.
Now again Luli didn’t recognize me—unsurprising after seven years, but enduringly strange to me, who has never not recognized a person. The other ComPA was someone I’d never seen before, a white girl with a buzz cut. Her hair and shirt were wet—it must have been raining before I arrived—and I automatically assumed she’d been out running errands for the electronics heiress. Of course this was malicious supposition, but again it turned out I was not wrong.
I walked toward them in what I imagined was a forthright proletarian manner and smiled at Luli deferentially. I took a risk by addressing her as “compañera,” and it seemed to still be correct; she smiled. But when I asked to see Evangelyne, her smile went away. The buzz cut scoffed. I had just walked in off the street and demanded to see the chairman of the national party.
“Evangelyne isn’t here now,” Luli said. “Perhaps one of us can help you.”
I presented my ComPA card by way of answer. It was a photo ID like a driver’s license. On the back it listed the committees I was on and the trainings I’d completed. I’d once had several of these cards because I was the one who made them up. I liked to work the laminator. I still kept two in my wallet; they made me feel I had had a rich life.
This was my first-ever card, on which my membership number was 005. I put it down with a flourish, like a lucky gambler turning over an ace, and said, “I helped Evangelyne with the first chapter, back in the day. We’re old friends.”
We all three looked at the photograph, a baby-faced me with bleached platinum hair and Goth makeup, self-consciously raising my chin for the camera. Then the two ComPAs read the name.
“Oh shit,” said Luli. “You’re Jane Pearson.”
The buzz cut hastily said, “I could take you to Evangelyne.”
“No, I’ll take her,” said Luli. “My god. Evangelyne will lose her shit. My god.”
“Could we both go?” the buzz cut said.
Luli made a “no” gesture with her hand, smiling at me with a glazed expression, a celebrity expression.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’d be eternally grateful.”